The Wager

Entire Dark-Hunters®/Hunter Legends Series, Lords of Avalon®

Original Publication Date: August 01, 2002

Setting: Avalon, Medieval England

While carousing late one night with his friends, the infamous writer, Sir Thomas Malory runs afoul of Merlin the Magician, and learns the value of keeping secrets when dealing with sorcerers, knights of Arthur, and the Lords of Avalon.

It also appeared in Elemental–An anthology of new work by 20 top science fiction and fantasy writers–including Sherrilyn Kenyon writing as Kinley MacGregor, Brian Aldiss, David Drake, Jacqueline Carey, Martha Wells, Larry Niven, Joe Haldeman, Eric Nylund, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson–will help raise money for survivors of the tsunami in Southeast Asia.

Characters

Thomas

The hero

Sir Thomas Malory was a man of many contradictions who spent much of his life in prison, awaiting trials for all manner of misdeeds. He was also a man of many resources, for he was always quick to escape those prison walls and find his freedom.
What most don't know is that through an uncommon act of kindness, Thomas found the doorway that connected our world with theirs and he spent much time in Avalon, learning the truth of...

Merlin

The heroine

Contrary to what many believe, Merlin wasn't a man. It was a title. Merlins were the advisors of the ancient kings. The Penmerlin was the High Merlin who sat at the right hand of the reigning monarch while the others were referred to as waremerlins.
The best known of the Merlins was Emrys who served both Uther and Arthur Pendragon, but Emrys Penmerlin was a man with well known weaknesses. Weaknesses that Morgen exploited so that she...

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The Wager

It’d been a long, cold…

Millennium.

Thomas paused as he penned those words. Surely it wasn’t that long. Was it? Frowning, he looked at the calendar on his PDA that Merlin had brought to him from what future man would call the twenty-first century and gave a low whistle.

Okay. It hadn’t been quite that long even though he lived in a land where time had no real meaning. It only felt like it and therefore he left the word on the paper. It sounded better than saying just a few centuries-and that was what writing was all about he’d learned. The truth was important, but not so much as keeping his audience entertained. News bored people, but stories…

That was where the money was. At least for people other than him. There was no money here, nor much of anything else.

But he was digressing. Millennium or not, it had been way too long since he’d last been free.

He who bargains with the devil pays with eternity. His dear old mangled mother had been fond of the saying. Too bad he hadn’t been better at listening- but then that was the problem with “conversation.”  So many times even when you paused for a breath you weren’t really listening to the other person so much as planning your next speech. Of course, he’d been a cocky youth.

What did some old crone know about anything anyway? he used to think. He was Thomas Malory. Sir Thomas Malory- couldn’t forget the Sir part. That was all important.

In his day that Sir had meant that he was a man with standing. A man with prospects.

A man with no friggin’ clue (Thom really liked the vernacular Percival had taught him from other centuries. There was just such color to some of the later phraseology… but now to return to what he’d been thinking).

Life had begun easy enough for him. He’d been born into a well-to-do family. A nice family… Nice incidentally was a four lettered word. Look it up, it really was. It meant to be agreeable. Pleasant. Courteous.

Boring.

Like any good youth worth his salt, he’d run as far away from nice as he could. Nice was for the weak (another four lettered word). It was for a doddering fool (see how everything vile led back to four letters {even vile was four letters}).

And Thomas was anything but a fool. Or so he’d thought.

Until the day he’d met her (Please insert footnote here that in French, la douleur i.e. pain is feminine). There was a reason for that. Women, not money, was the root of all evil (it was a trick of their gender that woman was five and not four letters, but then girl was four letters too. This was done to throw us poor men off so that we wouldn’t realize just how corrupt and detrimental they were).

But back to the point of our story. Women were the root of all evil. No doubt. Or at the very least the fall of every good man.

And Thom should know. He’d been doing quite well for himself until that fateful day when she had shown herself to him. Like a vision of heaven, she’d been crossing the street wearing a gown of blue. Or maybe it was green. Hell, after all these centuries it could have been brown. The color hadn’t mattered at the time because in truth he’d been picturing her naked in his mind.

And he’d learned one very important lesson. Never picture a woman naked when she was capable of reading your mind….